Robert Barnes reports out from inside SC after Greece v. Galloway

Why aren’t our favorite SCOTUS reporters quicker with the Twitter?!  Gah!  If we can’t get SCOTUS hard press passes (like 26 people in the U.S. have these) then all we can do is rely on the journalists inside to give us the scoop.  Thankfully, WaPo SC journalist Robert Barnes tweeted a link to his post-oral argument piece.  Check it out here.  And NPR’s legal expert Nina Totenberg covered it on this morning’s All Things Considered.

In a nutshell, it sounds like the liberal justices were troubled by the quantity of Christian prayers delivered at the start of Greece’s legislative sessions, to the general public no less, who, because of their need to conduct regular business with the legislative body, might feel religiously coerced in these situations.  The conservative justices voiced concerns that if the prayers were ordered to be more secular, government agents would be burdened with policing the prayers potentially infringing upon the Constitutional flip side of the Establishment Clause – the Free Establishment clause.

We’ll keep you updated once we figure out how to get Joan B., Nina T., and the rest of them on Twitter (faster).